A literal commentary on "Die Phanomenologie des Geistes," this study attempts to overthrow the general consensus of opinion that Hegel's "Phenomenology" is not the logical "science" he believed it be. The author seeks to identify an acceptably-continuous chain of argument in the text.

A two-volume set. Print edition available in cloth only. Awarded the Nicholas Hoare/Renaud-Bray Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, 2001 From the Preface: Hegel's Ladder aspires to be . . . a ‘literal commentary’ on Die Phänomenologie des Geistes. . . . It was the conscious goal of my thirty-year struggle with Hegel to write an explanatory commentary on this book; and with its completion I regard my own ‘working’ career as concluded. . . . The prevailing habit of commentators . . . is founded on the general consensus of opinion that whatever else it may be, Hegel’s Phenomenology is not the logical ‘Science’ that he believed it was. This is the received view that I want to overthrow. But if I am right, then an acceptably continuous chain of argument, paragraph by paragraph, ought to be discoverable in the text.

Hegel's classic Phenomenology of Spirit is considered by many to be the most difficult text in all of philosophical literature. In interpreting the work, scholars have often used the Phenomenology to justify the ideology that has tempered their approach to it, whether existential, ontological, or, particularly, Marxist. Werner Marx deftly avoids this trap of misinterpretation by rendering lucid the objectives that Hegel delineates in the Preface and Introduction and using these to examine the whole of the Phenomenology. Marx considers selected materials from Hegel's text in order both to clarify Hegel's own view of it and to set the stage for an examination of post-Hegelian philosophy. The primary focus of Marx's book is on the account. Hegel gives of the phenomenological journey from natural consciousness to philosophical wisdom (or absolute knowledge, as Hegel calls it). In showing that Hegel's many statements concerning consciousness 'finding itself' or 'knowing itself' in its world can be understood as discovering the rationality of the conditioning world, Marx offers a solution to several sets of interrelated problems that have troubled students of Hegel. His book contains valuable analyses of the relation between Hegel's thought and that of Descartes and Kant as well as that of Karl Marx, and it also sheds considerable light on the question of the internal unity or coherence of the Phenomenology.

A distillation of the author's masterful Hegel's Ladder, this lucid introduction to Hegel's thought articulates the conceptual unity of the Phenomenology as well as the structure of Hegel's system and the place of the Phenomenology within it.

Abdolkarim Soroush has emerged as one of the leading moderate revisionist thinkers of the Muslim world. He and his contemporaries in other Muslim countries are shaping what may become Islam's equivalent of the Christian Reformation: a period of questioning traditional practices and beliefs and, ultimately, of upheaval. Presenting eleven of his essays, this volume makes Soroush's thought readily available in English for the first time. The essays set forth his views on such matters as the freedom of Muslims to interpret the Qur'an, the inevitability of change in religion, the necessity of freedom of belief, and the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Throughout, Soroush emphasizes the rights of individuals in their relationship with both government and God, explaining that the ideal Islamic state can only be defined by the beliefs and will of the majority.

This book, which takes account of everything that survives from the manuscripts Hegel produced during his first academic career at the University of Jena, is the first comprehensive survey of the development of Hegel's mature system.